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Careful with the Riches of Grace (Galatians 5:13-15)
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Careful with the Riches of Grace (Galatians 5:13-15)
Galatians: The Truth of the Gospel :: A Study of Galatians
Sunday Message recorded 23 January 2022
by Pastor Victor Morrison
First Baptist Church
1700 Milam
Columbus, TX, USA 78934
http://fbccolumbustx.org/
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Transcript
Introduction & Welcome
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Growing in Grace with Pastor Victor Morrison. This is a ministry of First Baptist Church located at 1700 Milan Street, Columbus, Texas. We are praying that God will bless you as you listen to this message. If you would like additional information on worship times and ministries at FBC Columbus, you can find out more at our website, fbccolumbustx.org. And now take your copy of God's timeless word as Pastor Victor gives today's message.
00:00:43
Speaker
Well, good morning. Thank you so much for being here. My heart is already full from the time of worship, time of prayer together. Thank you so much. It's such a blessing to have so many in our church family, whether it's Sunday school teachers, deacons, worship leaders, instrumentalists. I mean, there's just so many that are so gifted and so blessed, and you share, and it's just powerful.
The Story of Jacob Junker
00:01:09
Speaker
This morning I would like to invite you to turn with me to Galatians. We haven't been here in a while, but Galatians 5 verses 13 through 15. There was a man that lived a long time ago in South Africa named Jacob Junker. He was 62 years old. He spent his life as a diamond prospector. He had been digging for 18 years.
00:01:33
Speaker
But he had found nothing. 18 years is a long time to dig and to dig, to hope that you're going to discover diamonds. Only every day you come home, do you find anything? Nothing today. So on January 17, 1934, he woke up. It had rained, a heavy rain the day before. It's all wet and muddy out there. So he said, you know what? Tells his wife, I'm not going today.
00:01:57
Speaker
I'm just going to send Gert. Gert was the name of his son. So he said, Gert, I need you to go in today. You take my place in the diamond fields and you dig today for me, would you? He said, sure, dad, it's cold. It's windy. I don't blame you. I wouldn't want to get out there either. So Gert went to the diamond mine, but he drove back a little bit later into the yard, into the driveway, recklessly
00:02:24
Speaker
and he had something in his hand. And his dad was just about to scold him for driving like that into the yard whenever Gert said, look dad, it was a 726 carat diamond.
00:02:37
Speaker
It's still to this day considered the fourth largest diamond in the world that's ever been discovered. It was later appraised at $5 million. Now, Junker and his wife were raising seven kids. So you can imagine now that they found that, no problem. They're gonna be in great shape now. But what's really strange and sad is that within just a few years, this man, Mr. Junker had mismanaged his wealth
00:03:08
Speaker
He had squandered his treasure, he had wasted everything, and so he was broke just a few years later.
00:03:16
Speaker
You know, Paul had already warned those Galatians, like I said, be careful if you're going to listen to those Judaizers.
Paul's Warning to the Galatians
00:03:23
Speaker
They're going to cause you to move away from that gospel of grace and to move back into that dark place of legalism. But in chapter 13, verse 15, he's going to warn them there's also another thing you need to be cautious about, licentiousness.
00:03:40
Speaker
to say, you know what, I'm saved by grace, so now I believe I can sin and I'll just be forgiven over and over and over and over again. So they willfully would choose to give in to the flesh. So how can they maintain spiritual balance between a yoke of slavery to the law and a yoke of slavery to the flesh? They're both equally dangerous and they both want to steal the treasure.
00:04:10
Speaker
of God's grace that's in your life. So I want us to stand together and look at this passage. It's just three verses. Galatians 5 verses 13 through 15. Would you stand with me? Let me read through here and just ask God to bless
Freedom in Christ: A Call to Serve
00:04:25
Speaker
our time together and then we'll begin. For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.
00:04:37
Speaker
But through love serve one another, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour one another,
00:04:53
Speaker
Watch out that you're not consumed by one another. Let's go to the Father in prayer. Oh Lord, I thank you so much for giving us clarity whenever we look into your word. Lord, sometimes we're thinking, how can I follow Christ? How can I be the disciple, the man, the woman, the student, the boy or the girl that the Lord wants me to be?
00:05:15
Speaker
I'm so glad your word gives us clear instruction. And so I pray that you would help strengthen each one of us so that we could walk humbly with you, depending upon you, but also cherishing that wonderful treasure of grace that you have deposited in each of our lives through Christ. It's in Jesus' name and for His glory that I pray. Amen. Thank you. You may be seated.
00:05:40
Speaker
When I was a student at Union University, which by the way is where all of the students are going to be going for camp this summer, I recall one of my professors, Dr. Bob Agee, saying, whenever you preach a passage of scripture, it's almost like you have a diamond in your hand.
00:05:58
Speaker
Don't run up here. This is not a diamond. This is just a rock, okay? So I don't want to be mobbed in the parking lot. Give me that diamond. But Dr. Bob Agee said, you can almost compare biblical exposition to the admiration of various facets of a diamond.
00:06:15
Speaker
The first beautiful facet in this exquisite diamond of grace that I want you to look at, let me call it the inheritance, the inheritance of grace through Christ. In verse 13 he says, for you were called to freedom, brothers.
00:06:34
Speaker
You see, God offers you through the hand of grace an incredible diamond of freedom, but it all comes through grace. It's like an inheritance. You understand inheritance, right? We don't work for an inheritance. We receive an inheritance. An inheritance is given. Can you imagine whenever Gert came with that
00:07:00
Speaker
that 727 carat diamond and had it and said to his father, dad, look!
00:07:08
Speaker
Can you imagine God calling you through the gospel message and saying, people look, look at what is available to you in my son, the Lord Jesus Christ. So just like Gert, the father sent his son to say, look what's available to you in my son. Of course, freedom is available, but I want you to look at what brought the freedom. It's the grace. It's that inheritance.
00:07:37
Speaker
Do you know that inheritance is actually a biblical word? If you were to do a research on the word inheritance in the scriptures, you'd find out that inheritance isn't just used one time, two times, three times. It's used 187 times. This is a primary word. But I want us to think about the call.
00:07:59
Speaker
You, for you were called to freedom, brothers. You were called, you were called through the gospel. When you heard the gospel, when the Galatians first heard the gospel, God was calling your name.
00:08:13
Speaker
Wouldn't you like it if someone were to offer you the diamond fields that the Johnkers had? Wouldn't you like it if someone said, hey, here's a 727 carat diamond. It's all yours. It's like God is offering you salvation in Christ. It's all by grace. No wonder Peter called our inheritance in Christ. These are the words he used. Peter said it's imperishable. It's undefiled. It's unfading.
00:08:42
Speaker
Paul wrote in Ephesians 1.11, it is found in him, in him we have obtained an inheritance. You know, people don't leave the same things behind for family when they pass away. There are all kinds of bequests that are left to family. Some leave jewelry, some leave money, some leave cars, some leave property, some leave stocks, some leave guns. It doesn't matter.
00:09:10
Speaker
Think about the inheritance of grace.
00:09:13
Speaker
that forever throughout all eternity, God says, I will accept you. You'll be welcome in my presence. You'll be welcome in my house in eternity, in heaven. Man, an inheritance of grace in Christ gives us freedom from the futility of trying as hard as we can in the flesh to gain God's approval, to gain God's forgiveness, and it'll never work.
00:09:42
Speaker
The only way is for you to say, I receive what Jesus did for me. That's the inheritance. But I want us to think about a second thing. To determine the value of a diamond, there are four components in the appraisal. There's the carrot weight, there's the clarity, there's the cut, and there's the color. Think about those four things for a moment. Three of those four are God-given.
00:10:09
Speaker
God placed those things in the diamond, right? There's the carrot, God put that in there, the color, and there's the clarity.
00:10:20
Speaker
all gifts of God. There's only
Purpose of Christian Freedom
00:10:22
Speaker
one of those four that are a part of human hands. You know what that is? The cut. The cut. You know, I'm told that if the man that cuts a diamond doesn't cut it just right, then the value diminishes drastically because he messed up in the way he cut it.
00:10:41
Speaker
Whenever I see this verse 16, here before, or 13, excuse me, he says, For you were called of freedom, brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. I think, ah, now we're talking about us and what we do with that diamond of grace that's just been handed to us.
00:11:06
Speaker
Notice that caution that he says, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. There's a danger there that despite having been saved by grace, you may not live by grace. True, the Judaizers were using their legalistic chisels to steal their freedom that they had through grace by faith in Christ.
00:11:33
Speaker
But something else would like to swindle. Something else would like to plunder the riches that we have in Christ. What is it? Well, He calls it here the flesh. The flesh, it's that fallen, sinful nature that makes every one of us selfish, makes us choose sin.
00:11:57
Speaker
makes us oppose what God wants to do in our lives. We'll see in a moment how the Holy Spirit, it's like He wants to go this way and the flesh says, I'm not going that way. And so the Spirit of God and the flesh of man, the flesh of woman, the flesh of every boy and girl wants to go opposite.
00:12:17
Speaker
And so the flesh is the opposition, but notice the opportunity. He says, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.
00:12:27
Speaker
I tried to research that word, even in the original language, and I found out it means the base of military operations. So in other words, don't let the flesh get a beachhead in your life. If you do, then God is going to not be able to give you all those things that you have in Christ because you're living in the flesh. You're going to miss out. You're going to short circuit God's plan, what he wants to do in your life.
00:12:55
Speaker
There was a man in West Virginia back in 2002 named Jack Whittaker. He won an incredible amount of money through a lottery, $315 million. But do you know that it's public record that Jack Whittaker says publicly, I wish I'd have never won it. I wish I'd have never got a dime of that money. And you think, what could be more significant than $315 million?
00:13:25
Speaker
Just ask him, he'll tell you.
00:13:28
Speaker
Whenever their family inherited all that money through that lottery, what happened was his daughter and then her daughter, his granddaughter, they got hooked on drugs. They weren't into drugs when they didn't have the money to buy the drugs. So they got into drugs. And then guess what happened eventually? Eventually his daughter and then after that his granddaughter, they both died because of an overdose of illegal drugs.
00:13:57
Speaker
And when it came right down to it, this man Whitaker said, you know what? I wish I'd have never received one dime from that lottery because it destroyed my daughter and it destroyed my granddaughter. What are we talking about here? We're talking about people who are wasting things, talking about people who give in to self-indulgence, who think it's all about me. Life is all about me.
00:14:24
Speaker
You know the NBA basketball star, right, Shaquille O'Neal? Maybe you've read this before, but when he first signed on as an NBA basketball player, within 60 minutes of signing the contract, he already went through a million dollars. Soon as he left the buildings, like, man, I'm buying a new car, buying new outfits, I'm buying a new house. So he just, within one hour's time, he went through a million dollars. He's not the only one.
00:14:52
Speaker
Have you not read that 70% of people who are lottery winners? They're broke in three to five years. Why is that? Oh, it's because of self-indulgence. So what about you with your Christian life? What about you with the grace, the forgiveness, the joy, all that's given to you?
00:15:14
Speaker
Are you just simply taking and receiving, and you're not doing anything with it outwardly? You see, that leads us to the third facet of this incredible diamond. Rather than wasting one's inheritance of grace through self-indulgence, Paul urged the Galatians to invest it. Invest it. How does one invest grace?
00:15:40
Speaker
The grace that you have, God's been so good to each one of us in this room. So how do we invest it? Oh, well, Paul gives it clear instruction. But through love, serve one another. Through love, serve one another. I think sometimes we're so confused about salvation. We're confused over what we're freed from. We're not clear about what we're freed for. It's not a freedom to sin.
00:16:10
Speaker
It's a freedom from sin. That's why the Lord saved us, so that we might say, you know
Investing in Grace
00:16:17
Speaker
what? I don't want to be self-centered anymore. You know, there's Jesus walking with the 12 disciples. It's like they're following behind this incredible man that's got all these riches, spiritual riches, spiritual riches of grace available to them. And Jesus overhears them,
00:16:40
Speaker
arguing. And he said, hey, hey, hey, what's going on, guys? What are you all arguing about? And you know what the Bible says in Luke 22, 24 through 27? What were they arguing over? Greatness. Who's going to be number one? Greatness. You see, if we don't give in to self-indulgence, then what are we going to do with it? You know what Jesus told him to do with it? Here's what he said.
00:17:09
Speaker
He said, instead of making life about you, why don't you humble yourself and serve others? He said, the way to go to the top in my kingdom is to serve.
00:17:22
Speaker
It's to serve. It's not to sit there and receive and receive. The preventative for self-indulgence is easy. Serve. Do something for the Lord and for his kingdom. But through love, serve one another. I love it because the word serve there is actually in the present tense. And so it's like he's saying, but through love, keep on serving one another.
00:17:48
Speaker
It's great if we serve the Lord, you know, for 30 years. Are you serving Christ this year? Are you serving Christ this week, this month? I think we are to say, Lord, until I drop, I want to be in your service because you have deposited so much grace, so much love, so much purpose in my life. I want to put it in motion, Lord.
00:18:17
Speaker
And so the purpose of the freedom, it's not for self, it's for others. It's to love other people. That's why Paul wrote to another congregation in Thessalonica in 1 Thessalonians 3, 12, and he said, you know what I've been praying for you? He said, here's what I've been praying. May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all.
00:18:47
Speaker
powerful, powerful. I've been praying that you will increase and abound in love from one another and for everybody out there. Wow, it's because it's the way we invest. So let's move to the next facet about this incredible diamond of grace, the index, the index for grace.
00:19:09
Speaker
Now, I don't know a lot about investing, but most investors look to an index to measure the performance of their investments in the wider securities market. Why do people even care what the Dow Jones Industrial Average is? Why do people even care to look on the New York Stock Exchange or all these other different references? Because they want to know, how's my investment that I'm making, how's it doing?
00:19:39
Speaker
How am I doing with my investment? So, as Christians, as disciples, what do we look to to see how am I doing with the investment that Christ has made in me and that I hopefully am investing in others?
00:19:59
Speaker
Well, I believe that if we want to know how monitor our growth in Christ, our growth in grace, I don't think we look to the culture.
00:20:10
Speaker
I think the culture is going to get us off track. So we don't look to the culture. We don't look to polls. We don't look to social media. We don't look to material wealth. We don't say, well, if it makes me feel good, pleasure. We don't go to say, okay, all my friends, what do you guys think? What's the best thing to do with your life?
00:20:33
Speaker
The index is the standard of the word of God. The written word of God is the index that we look to and say, how am I doing with the investment of grace and goodness that God has given to me? And so it's amazing, like some of those indexes have an incredible number of stocks, right? Different listings. For example, the NASDAQ has 3,300 listings.
00:21:04
Speaker
So where are you going to find out, okay, I want to know how I'm doing in growing in grace. I want to know how I'm doing in becoming more like Christ. Then the place to go is to go to the word of God and say, okay, so let's look at
00:21:21
Speaker
What they were facing was the possibility they would give into the flesh, the possibility that now the flesh is going to be causing each one of them to be selfish. And so here's what the word of God says in verse 14, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Did you notice how comprehensive that this search is?
00:21:48
Speaker
I mean, Paul, Jesus says the same thing here, but just right now we're talking about Paul, his writing to Galatia, so let's stay with Paul. Paul knew the Scriptures. He knew the Old Testament. There's a lot there. This is a huge research. And when he filters it all down, you know what he said? He said to bring it all down, the whole law. The whole law is fulfilled in one word.
00:22:16
Speaker
Man, that's phenomenal to bring it down to one word. And to make it a concise summary, he said, it's all fulfilled in this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. You know, Jesus said in Matthew 22, verses 37 to 40, they were trying to trap him. They were trying to test him. And so they were saying, hey, what's the most important command in the whole Bible?
00:22:45
Speaker
And he said, I want you to know that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord, love, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, all your strength. But then he said, the second commandment, the guy's like, whoa, I was just asking him for one, he's like, the second commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
00:23:04
Speaker
Do you know what, you know where that's found in the Old Testament? It's like the most off the trail place that you would ever imagine, Leviticus 19, 18. Love your neighbor.
00:23:19
Speaker
as you love yourself. Wow. I think God's really serious about that. And I think if we want to be serious in our discipleship, in growing to be the man, the woman, the student, the boy, the girl that God wants us to be, we've got to be serious about loving other people and about serving other people.
00:23:39
Speaker
Well, let's go to the last one. You know, in accounting, there's these two words. One is solvency and one is insolvency. If you had to take your pick, which one would you want? Don't go for the insolvency.
Balancing Legalism and Grace
00:23:53
Speaker
It's a serious situation when one's liabilities exceed one's assets. And so, positionally,
00:24:02
Speaker
Listen to what I'm saying. Positionally, in Christ, a man or a woman in Christ is always solvent for the rest of eternity. Always solvent. You will always have more than enough to cover for your sins, to help you be accepted in God's family and so forth. That's a no-brainer right there. Positionally,
00:24:28
Speaker
But practically, practically the sad reality is, and Paul brings it out here in this last verse that we're gonna look at, verse 15. You can be insolvent. I mean, it's like you can waste all that God's been doing in your life through this one thing. Here's what he says. If you bite, if you devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed.
00:24:57
Speaker
by one another." Wow. Isn't that amazing? That's why he says to those that he had led, to those that he had discipled, he had mentored in Galatia. He said, look, if you bite and devour one another, watch out. Did you not consume by one another?
00:25:18
Speaker
You know those words, it's like a progression. Picture in your mind, not humans. Humans don't act this way. Well, maybe in the nursery somebody might bite, but most of us don't bite. But anyway, think about this, bite, devour, consume. Picture a wolf pack. A bite is just one bite, just one nip.
00:25:42
Speaker
But to devour means to chew. It means you just keep on chewing and chewing and chewing. And then finally, pretty soon, it's all gone. Everything's gone. But what you don't realize is like I was told when I was in Canada in Inuit,
00:26:02
Speaker
that the Inuit farmers have a way of getting those old wolves that are attacking their livestock. And what they do is they bury a knife, a big knife. They bury it with a handle packed into the snow with a blade sticking up like this. And on that blade, they put a big hunk of meat.
00:26:25
Speaker
And so at night, the wolf comes, and he begins to eat that meat, and he gets so excited. His tongue is just enjoying the taste of it, but after a while, it's so cold, he doesn't realize. He's thinking, oh, that blood is just incredible. And when the Inuit man wakes up in the morning, there's a dead wolf, and there's the blade sticking up because he didn't realize it. It tasted so good, but you know what happened?
00:26:54
Speaker
It was his own blood. He killed himself. He ate and killed himself right there. And I think to myself, that's exactly what giving into the flesh does, no matter what form that it takes.
00:27:08
Speaker
You see, Jesus knew exactly how to handle spiritual riches. 2 Corinthians 8, 9 says about Jesus, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.
00:27:29
Speaker
So Jesus comes down here into this world. He's got an incredible gift. He's got, well, let's say a diamond. He's got a diamond of grace and he's offering it to you, to me, to every person on this earth. And so there were people, Pharisees, people sort of like those Judaizers that were simply saying, you know what? We got to shut that guy down. A lot of people are starting to follow him. So one day they thought they had him.
00:27:58
Speaker
They thought they finally had this gospel of grace trapped. And so they caught a woman in the very act of adultery, and they said, she is guilty. We've got her. And so, no doubt, she was guilty. So they get her up there against the wall. They've all got their rocks. And here's what they say to Jesus. Now, the law says that we should stone her.
00:28:25
Speaker
So Mr. Grace, what do you say we should do to her? And Jesus stands up and he says, I'll tell you boys what, let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her. From the oldest guy to the youngest guy, they dropped their stones.
00:28:49
Speaker
None of them could say that. None of them could say, I have never sinned. So they all dropped their stones and they walk away and Jesus goes over to the woman and he says, where are those that were condemning it? She said, you know, there are none. They're not there.
00:29:06
Speaker
Listen carefully to all that he says, neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on, sin no more. You see, he's the only one that was there that day that could have condemned her. He had every right to condemn her. He's holy.
00:29:24
Speaker
He's God. He had every right to condemn her. But what he says is, neither do I condemn you. And then he says something interesting. He says, go and from now on, sin no more. Do you see the perfect balance there between those who were legalists and this woman who had been living for the flesh, driven, slave to the flesh?
00:29:48
Speaker
And now Jesus brings it right down home into grace. And he says, you know what? I'm going to give you an incredible gift today, lady. And into her trembling hands, I think Jesus placed the diamond of grace. And what he said was he put his hands maybe on her hands and he said, you know what?
00:30:13
Speaker
You be careful. You be careful with the riches of grace that I just gave you.
Invitation to Embrace the Gospel
00:30:20
Speaker
Listen, brother in Christ, sister in Christ, are you completely accepted and forgiven for all of eternity in Christ? Yes, you are. It's an incredible message. But don't let the riches of grace
00:30:39
Speaker
be trampled in your life because you don't follow Christ. Every single day you are to say, Lord, because you've been so good for me.
00:30:48
Speaker
I want to follow you. I want to follow you in obedience. Let's all say, oh Lord, please help me just to cherish grace and to use that grace as a motivation to love others and to serve others. Let's pray. Lord, I don't know what you want to do with our time of invitation, but I just want to give it to you. And so just pray that you'd be exalted. I pray for those that don't know Christ, that they would just embrace the gospel.
00:31:14
Speaker
Embrace the faith that is available to them to say, I'm only going to trust not in what I've done for the Lord, but what he did for me. It does require that we turn in repentance, that we turn in faith to say, I want to follow Christ until the last breath. So God, we give you this time. Please bless it. And I pray you would be honored in our invitation. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.